Every hiring manager we talk to has an opinion about work model, and most of those opinions were formed by a single bad experience: a fully remote hire who disappeared, or a return-to-office mandate that triggered a wave of resignations. The reality, after running eCommerce searches across dozens of companies with completely different policies, is that no single model is universally right. What matters is whether the model fits the actual function, and whether it is communicated clearly enough that candidates know what they are signing up for.
This is not a debate we are trying to settle. It is a practical breakdown of what we are seeing work, function by function and level by level, so you can set a policy that fits your team rather than copying whatever your last company did.
The Short Version
eCommerce skews more remote-friendly than most retail and consumer-facing functions, because the core work, digital marketing, analytics, marketplace management, email and lifecycle, merchandising strategy, is performed on a screen rather than on a sales floor or in a warehouse. That said, the field has not landed on full remote as the default. Hybrid arrangements, typically two to three set days in office, are now the most common structure we see at Manager through VP level, particularly at companies with a physical headquarters and cross-functional teams in merchandising, supply chain, or creative.
Fully remote searches are still common, especially at digitally native brands, smaller companies without a central office, and for highly specialized individual contributor roles like paid media or technical SEO, where the work is self-contained and does not require daily collaboration with people in other departments.
What Work Model Fits Which Function
The clearest pattern we see is that work model expectations track the nature of the work itself, not the seniority of the role. The following reflects what we are placing into in 2026 across the functions we recruit for most often.
| Function | Most Common Model | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Digital Marketing / Paid Media | Remote or Hybrid | Self-contained, screen-based work with limited dependency on physical assets |
| Marketplace Management (Amazon, etc.) | Remote or Hybrid | Platform-driven work; collaboration with supply chain still benefits from in-person time |
| eCommerce Merchandising | Hybrid | Frequent coordination with buying, creative, and photo/sample teams |
| VP / Director, eCommerce | Hybrid | Strategy work is digital, but leadership benefits from in-person time with cross-functional peers |
| eCommerce Operations | Hybrid or In-Office | Frequently tied to fulfillment, inventory systems, or physical site visits |
| Email / Lifecycle Marketing | Remote | Highly self-contained, individual-contributor work |
These are patterns, not rules. We have placed remote VPs of eCommerce at companies with no physical headquarters at all, and we have placed in-office Email Marketing Managers at companies that simply prefer everyone on-site. The table reflects where the center of gravity sits, not a hard boundary.
What We Are Actually Seeing in Searches Right Now
A few years ago, hybrid felt like a negotiated middle ground between a company that wanted in-office and a candidate who wanted remote. That framing has mostly disappeared. Hybrid, usually two to three anchor days per week, is now the model most hiring managers propose from the start, and the model most candidates expect to see. It is no longer treated as a concession on either side.
Candidates can plan around a clear five-day in-office expectation, even if they would prefer otherwise. What consistently causes withdrawal mid-process is a hybrid policy that is communicated as flexible during the interview but turns out to mean near-daily office presence once the candidate starts. Ambiguity costs more trust than rigidity.
This sounds counterintuitive, since remote should widen the candidate pool. In practice, fully remote VP and Director searches often take slightly longer to close, because companies that go fully remote tend to also recruit nationally, which means more competing offers and longer decision cycles for candidates juggling multiple remote opportunities at once. The pool is bigger, but so is the competition for each candidate.
We have seen multiple Manager-level candidates leave companies specifically after a return-to-office mandate was announced, even when their performance reviews were strong. This pattern is less pronounced at Director and VP level, where candidates are more likely to have weighed the trade-off already and stayed, or where the role simply requires more in-person leadership presence regardless of policy.
How Work Model Affects Your Candidate Pool
This is the part that gets underweighted in internal policy discussions. Work model is not just a culture decision, it is a sourcing decision, and it directly affects how long a search takes and how strong the resulting slate will be.
Restricting a search to candidates within commuting distance of a physical office shrinks the available pool immediately, and the impact is larger outside of major metro areas. For a specialized role like a Senior Manager of Paid Media or a Director of Marketplace Strategy, where the qualified candidate pool nationally is already narrow, a strict in-office requirement in a secondary market can turn a six-week search into a twelve-week search simply because there are fewer qualified people within range.
The inverse is also true. Going fully remote without a clear structure can produce a flood of applications that are harder to filter, and can dilute the quality signal a recruiter is working with. The middle path, hybrid with a clearly defined number of anchor days and a defined radius or relocation expectation, tends to produce the strongest balance of pool size and pool quality.
The companies that struggle most with work model are not the ones that choose remote or in-office. They are the ones that have not decided, and discover their actual policy candidate by candidate, during live interviews. That ambiguity costs more strong candidates than either firm policy ever would.
How to Set Your Policy Before You Open the Search
The work model conversation should happen during role definition, before the first candidate is sourced, not during week three of interviews when a strong candidate asks a direct question nobody has prepared an answer for. A few questions worth resolving internally first:
- Does this specific role require regular in-person collaboration? Not the department as a whole, the actual role. A Director of eCommerce who works closely with in-house creative and merchandising has a different answer than a Director of Paid Media running a largely independent function.
- Is your current team distributed or co-located? A hybrid policy is harder to enforce meaningfully if half the existing team already works from a different city. Be honest about what the policy will actually look like in practice, not what it looks like on paper.
- Is your compensation competitive enough to require in-office presence? In a market where comparable remote roles exist at similar pay, asking for in-office time without a compensation or flexibility trade-off elsewhere makes the role less competitive by default.
- Will the policy be the same for every candidate, or does it have room to flex for an exceptional hire? Decide this before you are deep into a search and tempted to make an exception under pressure. Inconsistent application of policy creates internal friction later.
Once the policy is set, state it plainly in the job posting and the first recruiter conversation. Candidates do not need the policy to be generous. They need it to be accurate.
For more on building out the rest of the role before you go to market, see our posts on choosing the right level to hire and what a strong eCommerce interview process looks like. If you are weighing whether a direct hire or a fractional arrangement fits your current work model better, our fractional eCommerce consultants page covers how that works, or reach out directly to talk through your specific search.